Shining Vs. Bragging: Marketing Through The Self Doubt
Your mean inner monologue could be preventing you from accessing your new biggest fans and most loyal customers.
Here’s how to clear the insecurity cobwebs so you can market effectively.
Marketing & Vulnerability
When it comes to startup founders, sole proprietors, artists, musicians, dancers, and creatives of all kinds, one of the most common marketing hangups I hear is the aversion to bragging about oneself.
The more personal the work is, the more it ties to your identity, the more vulnerable it feels to put it out there for customers to take or leave. When a customer decides to pass, the more it can feel like a rejection of you.
If this sounds like the anxiety conga line in your head, it’s likely that this fear of rejection is hindering your marketing strategy. It’s also preventing the throngs of people who would love what you’re selling from ever finding out about you.
What if you’ve got the precise medicine someone needs? What if you have the perfect solution to their tricky problem? Don’t let your insecurity prevent you from crafting effective marketing to reach them.
In this article we’ll work to:
Deprogram some beliefs that keep you locked into feeling like an imposter.
Share some tools for confidently identifying and communicating the value of what you offer.
Discuss the difference between boasting and simply being awesome.
Explain how to craft messaging that shines rather than brags.
Oppression: I Can’t Believe It’s Not Imposter Syndrome!
Many, many of the small business owners and creatives I know accuse themselves of having imposter syndrome. They guiltily explain this is why they struggle to market themselves.
Let’s check in about that. Hang on tight, we’re about to get a little radical.
For the majority of my career, save when I started my own business, I felt like a complete outsider in every corporate setting I entered. For much of that time, I wrote it off to my individual insecurities and subscribed to the popular literature around imposter syndrome, learning to “lean in,” and what not.
Then I read an article that changed my whole way of thinking about it. In their 2021 Harvard Business Review article “Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome,” Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey explain,
“The impact of systemic racism, classism, xenophobia, and other biases was categorically absent when the concept of imposter syndrome was developed. Many groups were excluded from the study, namely women of color and people of various income levels, genders, and professional backgrounds. Even as we know it today, imposter syndrome puts the blame on individuals, without accounting for the historical and cultural contexts that are foundational to how it manifests in both women of color and white women. Imposter syndrome directs our view toward fixing women at work instead of fixing the places where women work.”
If you’re constantly the only person of color with a seat at the table, if you’re the only woman in a leadership role, if no one else brings a same sex partner to the company picnic, if you’re the only one including your pronouns in your email signature… chances are you feel like an outsider.
But, this is not because you have some deep seated insecurity issues or an inferiority complex you need to go solve on your own.
You feel like an outsider because you literally are one. When you feel bad because a group only accepts you if you change your natural hair style, drastically shift your way of speaking, or never ever mention you’re not in a heterosexual relationship- that’s because your environment is treating you like an imposter whenever you don’t conform to the expectations of the dominant group. Sometimes that means closing off parts of yourself, sometimes that means molding yourself into an identity that doesn’t fit, sometimes that means hyper achieving just to maintain the most minimal amount of acceptance.
So, it might just be oppression. Your feelings aren’t flawed, they’re simply reflecting your experience.
There’s a whole list of “isms” we could go through to check whether it’s imposter syndrome or oppression (or both). Racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, capitalism, transphobia, fatphobia, sex work stigma, lack of accommodation for neurodivergence, the list goes on… and on… and on.
Many of the creatives I know have a long history of being painfully “othered” by society for one reason or another. It makes complete sense that they have resulting hang ups around marketing their deeply personal business, art, music, products, etc. in a way that celebrates their othered identity.
I’m here to tell you to celebrate it anyway.
Let’s get into some tools to make sure your marketing reflects your confidence rather than your anxiety.
How Foundational Documents Can Help You Get On The Same Page With Yourself
I always recommend pregaming your content marketing efforts by making sure you have the following foundational documents in order:
Business Plan
Mission & Vision Statement
Messaging Framework
Even if not a soul other than you ever sees any of these documents, they are important for you to have so that you have a solid understanding of your business identity.
When you have a solid understanding of your business identity, it becomes a lot easier to make marketing decisions and investments.
Business Plan
There are a lot of different reasons to have a business plan, but the two I want to focus on here are establishing clear offers and clear goals.
Even though it often feels like marketing means you have to brag about yourself, that’s not actually the case. You need to communicate what you offer to whom. And what about you makes you qualified to deliver on those offers in a uniquely spectacular way.
When your marketing is in service to achieving a specific business goal, it will feel a lot less like bragging about yourself and a lot more like smart strategy.
So, say you want to sell 5 more fine art prints than you normally do a month. To do that, you need more people to know about you. You’ve seen the most engagement with your art on Instagram, so that seems like a good place to focus on getting your art in front of more people who might buy it. So, you decide to start posting your artwork more frequently, maybe add in some videos about your process, maybe repost nice comments from followers to your stories. Perhaps you start regularly reposting your most popular prints to make sure new followers see them.
Because this serves a business goal, it can help you brush past any anxiety that may have talked you out of promoting yourself so heavily in the past.
For this reason, I highly recommend writing up a business plan that clearly explains what you are selling and what your goals are.
Business plan templates abound, find one that works best for your context. Here’s one that helped me write mine.
Mission & Vision Statement
You know that saying, “If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything”? Yeah, let’s not do that with your marketing.
Boil down what you’re trying to do with your business into one sentence. That’s your mission statement.
Be warned, this takes some time and effort. You’re really going to have to cut out the fluff and get to the heart of what you have to offer.
I promise, it’s worth it.
Figuring out your mission statement is a powerful exercise because it really helps you get clear on what you’re trying to do.
When you know who you are, what you stand for, and what you want, it’s much easier to explain what you bring to the table, to feel confident in the value of what you’re offering, and to get the word out far and wide.
Here’s the M.Isa Messaging Mission Statement, for example:
“Unlock new worlds of success, abundance, and access with message-driven marketing.”
Marketing is broad, and I could have gone a lot of different ways with this. If my business identity was all about making money, if there was no social justice component to my business model, if I really specialized in marketing technology, I’d probably have a very different mission.
But, I knew I had a lot of expertise to offer in messaging. I also knew that this expertise could help open doors to greater abundance for my favorite creatives, small businesses, advocacy groups, and startups. Plus, I knew my confidence cheerleader tendencies could take the intimidation out of marketing for people. Hence the “boldly go where no man has gone before” vibes to the mission statement.
Now let’s talk about vision. Your vision statement is the result of carrying out your mission that you want for your community and the world.
For example, the M.Isa vision is to have historically marginalized individuals and businesses have greater access to wealth, success, and recognition.
With my mission and vision clear, it’s helped me to quickly produce content marketing because I can streamline marketing initiatives that support my business identity and carry out my goals.
There are tons of templates for mission & vision statements just a quick Google Search away. Here’s one I found helpful in crafting mine.
Messaging Framework
OK, so you know who you are, what you have to offer, what you’re trying to do, and in service to what grand vision. Great.
Now you need to figure out how you’re going to explain all that to your customers in a way that’s going to convince them to give you their money.
That’s where messaging frameworks can really be a life saver. Again, there are many different templates for these and many different potential formats (here’s one I like), but the important thing is that they can give you the actual wording to describe your business or offer at various levels of detail.
Messaging frameworks are one of my personal favorite marketing projects, and while I tend to customize the format depending on the business context, here are some elements I almost always include:
Elevator Pitches- explaining the offer and its value in 25 words or less, 50 words or less, and 100 words or less
Ideal Customers- who the offer is for
Customer Pain- what problem is the offer solving for your customers
Customer Requirements- what’s their criteria for determining whether you can help them
Messaging Pillars- the key benefits of your offer
Proof points- the evidence to support your value claims
Differentiators- how you and your offer are different from the competition
Developing this messaging blueprint will prevent you from feeling like you need to reinvent the wheel every time you launch a marketing initiative, post on social media, or have a sales conversation.
(Hint: you can book M.Isa to develop messaging frameworks for your brand or products/services, etc.)
Shining Vs. Boasting
A lot of us have received a lifetime of conditioning against bragging and boasting. But there is a difference between boasting and shining, between arrogance and confidence, between psyching yourself out and being appropriately humble.
Strong marketing requires confidence in what you have to offer. You’re going to have to get comfortable with assertively communicating the value you bring.
Here are a few things to think about if you’re worried about being too boastful in your marketing.
Can you back up the claims you are making?
Coming from marketing for tech companies, I can’t tell you how many times I had to talk folks out of saying stuff like “best of breed” or “industry leading” if they had nothing to back up these claims (like usage stats, customer ratings, or a #1 ranking in a prestigious listing, etc.)
So, no, you shouldn’t make lofty claims you can’t support.
But if you have a storied career, scores of customer success stories, hard earned expertise, an amazing album that dancers all over the internet can’t stop choreographing, a post of your painting that earned thousands of likes… Celebrate it!
Winning energy is contagious. Let your potential customers join in on the party.
Do you think you’d have more business if more people knew about you?
If one of the biggest problems your business is facing is dissatisfied customers, the right marketing move probably isn’t to double down on how rad you are in your messaging. Instead, you may want to check your messaging to make sure you’re giving an accurate depiction of what you offer and who will find it most useful.
But, if people are wild about what you’ve got once they see it- just not enough people see it- marketing can really help boost awareness of your offer. Again, this isn’t bragging. This is just a smart strategy to achieve a business goal.
How many adjectives are you using?
Many of us get suspicious when we see marketing with a long list of buzzwords describing how amazing, innovative, and transformative something is. If you’re leaning on lofty, flowery, visionary language but never getting to the specifics in your marketing, then yeah, this smells of boast.
Make sure you answer the specifics of what you offer: who it’s for (and not for), what exactly is being promised, when it’s available, where it’s offered, and why you’re the best one to offer it.
Social proof like testimonials and customer success stories also go a long way toward demonstrating your value rather than just making claims about it.
If you’re doing more showing than telling, don’t worry about bragging. That’s just good marketing.
Shine On
Marketing doesn’t have to dunk you in the anxiety swamp. It can be fun and empowering- not to mention, make you a lot more money. Don’t let unhelpful social conditioning prevent you from showing the world what you’ve got.
Need some help ignoring your anxiety and putting together a strong marketing strategy? That’s what we’re here for.
